PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Matt Gallant

Personal Essay

Second Draft



I grew up in an active Catholic home. I grew up being taught everything. Everything I knew was already thought up for me. I believed in God, seeing him as a fatherly figure, constantly controlling my life. They worded it as me being a sheep, but I was more accurately a marionette, being played by delusions.

When I started writing, I realized I was more than just a sheep, being flocked, but a shepherd of my own self. I no longer felt like an ugly goat tethered to a fence, slaven to some higher, separate king. I realized reality was whatever I made of it.

Through the deep, neutral feeling of being an artist and writer, I began to think for myself, and I started seeing the world in its entirety. I saw God, not as a separate being to fear, but as a higher will, more abstract a manifestation. I saw it as the raw emphasis of energy, the enthusiasm to exist, and the entrancing Being of Nothing. I saw myself as a part of it all, an element of it. I realized that every decision I made had an affect on everything else in this world, that my existence made me an element of an incredible, indescribable reality, rather than being plopped there to be born, to live, and to die. I saw things for how they really were, and noticed every ounce that that this reality holds. Things all made sense to me. I saw that, even in death, my existence never ever ceased, for when dead, I took up space. My body was still matter, six feet under. My abstract self still lived within the memories of all people I would have encountered in my life.

I noticed a balance between life and death, as two parallel states of existence, blurred together in a way, by sleep and the relative level of consciousness. I came to believe that, in passing into death, one always became unconscious, first, for maybe even a split second, I saw then that, in both states, I dwelled within a specific past, present, and future.

Although a few of my ideas and perspectives were mentioned and acknowledged, they are merely nutshells of a vast ocean, so incredibly- intricate, I myself am not even fully-aware of my own capacities. The point I am making by this essay, is that I now, through art and writing, am able to think clearer, and to keep an open, neutral mind to all views. As Henry David Thoreau put it, I am now able to suck the marrow out of life.